24 Hours of LeMons Arse Freeze-a-Palooza: The Winners!

Murilee Martin

Dec 10, 2013

With the compressed two-day (instead of the usual three-day) schedule for the seventh annual Arse Freeze-a-Palooza 24 Hours of LeMons, we had to inspect all 180 entries in a four-hour frenzy and then send them all onto the track immediately. This set the tone for the aptly named Arse Freeze-a-Palooza, which saw plenty of bent metal and red-misty driving on the Sonoma Raceway road course. When it was all over on Sunday night, history had been made: for the first time in 104 LeMons races, a Porsche took the win on laps!

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

We’ve had quite a few Porsche 944s and 924s come close to an overall win in the past, but that Stuttgart machinery just tends to break in most heartbreaking fashion. Saabs have won LeMons races, Ford Taurus SHOs have won LeMons races, even GM has done it… but we never believed that a LeMons-grade 944 could keep running for an entire race weekend. Finally, Porch Racing (there’s a little porch built onto the rear of the car, get it?) and their 1989 Porsche 944 clawed out a tenuous lead early in the race and defended it for the rest of the weekend. When the checkered flag came out, Porch Racing had finished 267 laps while the very tough Eyesore Racing had 265.

The Porch Racing Porsche wasn’t quite as quick as the other top cars in this race, but the drivers made no mistakes and the car didn’t break. The lack of breakage is especially impressive, given that the team built the car’s engine out of two bad junkyard engines, on a picnic table at the track last year. In the rain.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Well done, Porch Racing!

The Class B victory was especially hard-fought this time, with the Coming From Behind 1966 Dodge Dart, the Road Dent Racing Saturn SL2, and the Panting Polar Bear Racing Ford Crown Victoria locked in a single-lap battle for most of the weekend. In the end, the Saturn crashed, the Dart got a black flag and then wouldn’t restart in the Penalty Box, and the Panting Polar Bears grabbed Class B victory (and 10th place overall) by a margin of less than a lap.

The Class C race also was very exciting, with the 1984 Datsun Maxima of Team Magic spending the entire weekend breathing down the neck of the 1991 BMW 850i of Team Miami Vice. Yes, it takes a V12-powered German prestigemobile that sold for over $100,000 when new (we can’t think of a car with a steeper depreciation curve) to beat a slushbox-equipped Maxima with bouncy stock suspension!

The Most Heroic Fix award for this race went to Rich von Sneidern, the team captain of Rocket Surgery Racing, but not for fixes performed at the race track. The Rocket Surgery Checker Marathon (winner of the Index of Effluency award at the BFE G.P. in June) set out from Denver to drive the 1,400 miles to Sears Point… and things didn’t go so well.

A snowstorm and plummeting temperatures rendered the interior of this 1978 Checker Marathon (which had no weatherstripping and only a semi-functional factory heater) a steel-box vortex of subzero winds. By the time the Checker reached Rawlins, Wyoming, the mercury was down to 21 below zero Fahrenheit and Rich couldn’t make another mile.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Fortunately, Rich had a heater core salvaged from a Volvo 240, some heater hose, and a computer cooling fan handy. He used big pliers to gnaw a hole in the Checker’s fender, routed some heater hose into the passenger compartment, and plumbed the Volvo heater core in series with the Checker’s heater core.

This rig was set up next to the driver’s seat, and Rich draped a blanket over the whole mess. Meanwhile, torn-up flannel shirts and zip-ties were used to create field-expedient weatherstripping. These improvements raised the Checker’s interior temperature from 20 below to about zero, which was enough to permit the Checker to continue its journey. Heroic fix!

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The I Got Screwed trophy just had to go to Team Bad Decision, for taking a perfectly good 1984 Mercedes-Benz 300D sedan and installing a 440-cubic-inch Chrysler V8 in the passenger-seat area.

The 440 swap wasn’t enough; the Bad Decision W123 also had this homemade dry-sump oiling system, which suffered from some severe leakage issues. We love this car, of course, and encourage more teams to make these sorts of bad decisions.

Dia de los Lemons, a Nissan 240SX-driving team, received the Judges’ Choice trophy as sort of a “most improved” honor; this team spent most of Saturday in the penalty box, getting yelled at by the LeMons Supreme Court for a variety of bad-driving offenses. On Sunday, the Dia de los Lemons drivers saw the light and stopped their spinny, crashy, wipe-outy ways.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Pit Crew Revenge and their dually ’87 Mazda pickup-based motorhome took home the Organizer’s Choice award. With a real dead chicken attached to the roof and curtains fluttering out the windows, the Pit Crew Revenge RV added class to the scene on the race track.

The 1987 Plymouth Reliant-K wagon of the passed-from-team-to-team “K-It-FWD” program showed up to the season-ender race (in caravan with the Rocket Surgery Checker) for what we fervently hoped would be its last appearance in a LeMons race. The car didn’t run so well (finishing 125th out of 180 entries), but its presence was the motivation needed to lure dozens of K-It-FWD-veteran racers from the Eastern, Southern, Gulf, and Midwest LeMons regions to the Arse Freeze. This turned the race into something of a reunion for racers from across the country, which was fun for all.

The top prize of the race, the Index of Effluency, was awarded to the AMCI Starletans and their 1982 Toyota Starlet. Other than the wheels, this little beige hatchback was completely stock, down to its 58-horsepower pushrod engine and tippy suspension, and its lap times were nearly as slow as those of the Toronado and the Mazda motorhome. Even so, the Starletans finished in P80, beating 100 mostly quicker entries.

Not many teams snag an Index of Effluency trophy their first time out. Congratulations, AMCI Starletans!